Lee Harrison's Blog

For the past six months I’ve been writer-in-residence at St. Mary’s College in Hull, working with First Story, a charity promoting creative writing in secondary schools. The premise is – 1) Do creative writing with your selected kids, using their stories with their voices and experiences. 2) Put a real live anthology together for real live publication.

As a sort-of* genre writer, I was wary of coming at the workshops with a SFF slant, but also wondering if and how I might bring this to the ta...

A long overdue update –

Nearly six months ago now, THE BASTARD WONDERLAND launched at a fine event hosted by Kardomah94. In a packed house I was interviewed on stage by the splendid Russ Litten, and it went really well, was a good laugh, with an engaged audience, and fine musical support from HorseGuards Parade. Afterwards, there was a signing queue that – -astonishingly – spanned the room. It felt like a proper occasion, the culmination of a shitload of work, waiting and anguish finally MARK...

These are interesting times, and so, an update:

This week, I have finally received beautiful print copies of this here book –

It is a slightly surreal experience to see the product of your love, labour and commitment over many years to be condensed into a slab of glory. Nice to be able to wield it as proof that I’ve actually been doing something in the world. It reminds me of that Wonka machine that huffs and puffs and clanks and takes ages to produce just one tiny sweet, a boiled-down singu...

The Bastard Wonderland is a genre defying sort-of fantasy, as various earlier posts and rants have declared.

Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to write a fantasyepic. My own epic.There was appeal in theway thatclassic fantasy stories laid out the elements of story in stark, primary colours. All stories have a journey, adversity, an enemy, the finding of inner strength or help from elsewhere, an ultimate goal, andfantasy is appealing because it lays out these elements in simple Duplo Br...

This week, in the lifelong buildup to publication of THE BASTARD WONDERLAND in June, I went to have an author photograph done by local photographer Richard Steadman, so that my mug can be on press releases and blogs like this. Make me look authorial, I said. Capture my best side. Make it snazzy, I said, so as to distract from my dodgy writing. And so I sashayed around against a backdrop of urban post industrial decay for a bit.

And here it is:

No, here it is.

The Authorial Lee Harrison

See me...

It all began with lots of cheese, and a trip around the sun.

I’ve been to several of the Humber Mouth festival events this past week or so, and put short, it’s been special. There’s a definite festival feeling, not just at the events themselves, but a wondrous sensation that’s followed me around, as if I genuinely have been in some trippy field all week.

There’s a lovely, core ‘arts crowd’ in Hull, many of whom I’m getting to know better as time goes on, and this community is ever refreshed...

It’s official. THE BASTARD WONDERLAND will be published in 2016 by Wrecking Ball Press. And so, having done the rounds of the capital, Mr. Warboys returns to his spiritual home.

I told you so

Details and date to be confirmed. Chuffed.

‘You get out there, out to sea or whatever it is. And it’s brilliant at first. I remember seeing this bloody line across the horizon, like Hagen’s silver coast all over again. But then what happens? You get there. You get there, and it ain’t silver at all. It’s a shithole, same as the one you came from.’
‘It’s Port Ness!’ laughed Bill.
‘And then you look up, and there it is again. That fucking Silver Coast, never any nearer.’
‘You’re a bit philosophical today son!’ laughed Bill, slapping h...

I wentfor an appointment at the local ENT department,andit turns out that I seem to have an intermittent case of tinnitus. It’s basicallyringing in the ear. Apparently, tinnitus is a neurological, not a physical condition, and so there isn’t really any treatment for it. But my doctor tells me, with an accent I can’t place coming from beneath his excellent moustache, that to deal with it, ‘we have to talk about this word, “Brain”‘

Some face it, and choose to ignore, whilst others deny it. Some...